README.md

Oxygen

Oxygen (oxy) is a distributed, commutative version control system written in Rust for large repositories. See docs/spec.md for the specification, docs/guide.md for a user guide by task, and docs/protocol.md if you are implementing a client or server.

It is self-hosting: this directory is an Oxygen repository, and the project's own history is kept with oxy, not with Git.

What is different

• History is a set of changes, not a chain of snapshots. A change records what it did to identified lines and tree nodes and which earlier changes it depends on. Changes that do not depend on each other commute, so there are no merge commits and rebasing independent work rewrites nothing.
• Conflicts are data. A conflicted state can be committed, pushed and pulled. Resolving one is an ordinary edit followed by a commit.
• Every change has a stable ID and a content hash. The ID survives rewrites; the hash makes history tamper-evident.
• Everything is signed. Composite Ed25519 + ML-DSA-65 signatures on changes and on every bookmark update, verified against a trust policy that lives in the repository.
• Every operation is undoable through an operation log.
• Large files are chunked with content-defined chunking into a BLAKE3-addressed store.

Status

Early, but usable for its own development. Implemented: the object model, the change graph with conflict detection and resolution, the working copy (status, commit, checkout, diff, undo), identities and signatures, remotes over local paths and HTTP(S) with clone, fetch, pull, push, the reference server oxy serve, the trust policy, and packed storage.

Not yet: checkpoints for very long histories, history editing (rebase, split, edit), multiple workspaces, garbage collection with retention, and the Thin client profile for constrained machines.

Building

cargo build --release
cargo test --workspace

The binary is target/release/oxy.

Quick start

oxy identity create --name "Your Name" --email [email protected]
oxy config --user core.sign change      # sign every commit
oxy init                                 # in a project directory
oxy status
oxy commit -m "First change"
oxy log                                  # -n 10 for the latest ten, -v for full messages

Output uses colour, glyphs, and relative times on a UTF-8 terminal, and falls back to plain ASCII when piped, with --plain, or with NO_COLOR set.

Collaborating:

oxy serve --root /srv/oxy --bind 0.0.0.0:8890 --tls-cert cert.pem --tls-key key.pem --token SECRET
oxy clone https://host:8890/project
oxy config remote.origin.token SECRET
oxy push
oxy pull

Trust policy, so a server accepts only changes from keys you have granted:

oxy policy init                          # your key becomes the root
oxy identity export                      # a contributor sends you this file
oxy policy grant alice.identity
oxy push                                 # publishes the policy

Working alongside Git: oxy git import <repo> <dest> converts a Git history, oxy git fetch <url> brings new commits of a Git remote into the bookmark, oxy git push <url> publishes the bookmark as commits on top of them, and oxy git export <dir> writes a plain Git mirror.

Keys have a lifecycle: oxy identity rotate moves to a fresh key pair (the policy follows), oxy identity renew --expires 365 sets an expiry, oxy identity delegate add bot.identity lets another key sign for you, and oxy identity revoke retires a key. With several root keys, oxy policy root add|remove|threshold and oxy policy sign gather the required signatures through proposal files.

Layout

Licence

MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option.